THE SAI SPIDERWEB AND HOW I ESCAPED IT

Beliefs, once adopted often after much searching and seeking, tend to grow of themselves. The believing mind seeks all that can reinforce the belief and tends to reject or ignore whatever may conflict with it. Often it is because the belief helps inspire and strengthen good qualities in oneself and positive action towards the world, along with a meaningfulness of purpose in life and the cosmos. When the flames of such a positive intention are fed by constant supportive 'spin' and stories of many others' 'subjective experiences' which no one can control and the fewest can investigate to any reasonable extent, they continue to consume people. Our own experience - being all that we really know - can often be distorted if we have allowed our minds to be programmed by a doctrine. It is overshadowed by the false expectations created by remaining in an environment of a sect or a cult.

However, when serious doubts emerge, doubts that will not disappear and can only be ignored with difficulty, they too can grow as the facts go on bolstering them, whether one likes it or not. Otherwise, when confronted face on and investigated, unjustified doubts and rumours subside and fragment. This cannot occur in the case of Sathya Sai Baba, as the coming year will continue to demonstrate on an even wider front. My own strongly-held belief in him for nearly two decades was not shaken, even as it was gradually being nibbled away at the edges all the time due to more and more disturbing incidents and fishy explanations of things that were covered up from most people. Eventually, I was fundamentally challenged by indubitable facts about the murders in 1993 in Sathya Sai Baba's bedroom and later by the massive evidence - still emerging - of his constant sexual abuses of young men and boys. It took four years for me slowly to come to terms and investigate with the murders evidence, plus three more to examine and follow-up enough sex abuse facts to be convinced… of Sathya Sai Baba's guilt! My doubts were further reinforced as subsequent events have unfolded, not least by the way Sathya Sai and many of his most keen followers have reacted, in a manner quite contrary to his teaching and their proclaimed ethos, which puts truth on a pinnacle (but actually only in word, not action). The rationalisations, lies and often slurs and defamations - also from Sathya Sai Baba himself - speak loudly for themselves. This is indeed a threadbare 'God Almighty'!

The basic tenet of the Sai religion, that Sathya Sai Baba he is the predicted great Avatar of the Age, with the more and more fantastic corollaries that he is Vishnu, Rama and Krishna come again, the Father of Jesus, God Incarnate and so on ad. inf. Having finally discovered that this was no longer even a possible hypothesis to accept, I began to look more and more closely with a critical eye at his many claims and teachings, which I knew extremely well from my more intensive 20-year study than anyone else I happened to meet in the Sai movement. While I had previously sought to explain away discrepancies and inaccuracies, sweeping generalizations and wild ideas, I began to examine them in a much more even-minded manner. The results are know to all who have looked into my website in which I demonstrate the tremendous fraud involved in the Sai doctrine at all levels, and especially as regards the continual conflicts between what Sathya Sai Baba says and actually does. This has become so blatant that it seems he can get away with anything, having managed to deceive his followers so totally that they have lost all normal human judgment.

A person whose charisma and social power backed up by some scientifically-inexplicable psychic powers had overwhelmed me, as it still does more than a million people, has turned out to fit most of the characteristics of a psychopath and sociopath, with megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur and a power complex which is also expressed through homosexual abuses. Though I could not know many things about him until many years had passed and I happened to learn them from one of his closest servitors (V.K. Narasimhan), I was still somewhat amazed at how I could have been so effectively blinded by his whole doubtful set-up and the apparent light of what he 'teaches' (which are nevertheless standard Indian religious fare - often superficial - all taken from a rich tradition). The greatest possible abuse of others is abuse of their faith. This, above all else, I consider to be the most serious accusation I lay at the door of Sathya Sai Baba.